Will Vale

Good luck with the final push - it's amazing what you can get done against a deadline

Looks very good. The foot step really stands out in the picture - it's so fine. I think with a few of this kind of detail on a model it's very easy for the eye to read it as the real thing since it's got enough resolution, if you see what I mean?

Thanks for all the kind comments - it spurred me on to make another three today (since the inner tube worked out to 1/4 of a length of K&S) which went pretty quickly and are a bit neater than the prototype (less solder inside the shade) to boot. I think I'll put a pad on the far side of the track where the relay cabinets are going to be and install a lamp there. I'll look into this - although possibly for some other lights now, see below. Thanks for the suggestion Thinking back maybe you mentioned them as the source for your 37 cab lights? I was able to reduce the clutter below the shade by mounting the LED the other way up, so the leg soldered from the post is at the top, and the wired leg at the bottom. This also means there's no need for tape insulation (the wire join is short and in free space) and it's possible to make it a bit more compact - I ended up cutting the short leg back to about 1mm. I'll take a picture at some point but it's more-or-less an upside down version of what I showed above. Before working this out, I tried a couple of other schemes, like bending the legs 180' and mounting the LED pointing down, but it was too easy to either file too much off the lens (dead LED) or snap the legs doing the bend (unusable LED). As-is is good, since it only uses 90' bends and the lens can remain intact.

Whitemoor has an awful lot of quite distinctive modern lamps - any picture shows them quite well. I need at least three, probably more. I was thinking initially about using this N-scale Viessmann lamp since they should only about 50mm tall in 4mm, but I wanted to try and build one first since the shape looked relatively straightforward, and the Viessmann lamp doesn't have the wider section (cable cabinet?) at the base of the post. I bought some 3.2mm square brass tube (since the inside dimension was small enough for a 1.8mm "lighthouse" LED) and a couple of lengths of telescoping round tube (I think 1.6 and 2.4mm) from the model shop on my way home this afternoon. The reason for doing this now, when I should be weathering track etc., is that I'm going to be in Germany for a couple of days in the near future, so I wanted to know whether or not I need the Viessmann lamps before I get there - they're cheaper there! Anyway, back to the home-made lamp - it's all brass, soldered with a 20-watt iron and electronics solder. I've never built anything like this before - I used superglue for my one etched relay box - so you can probably imagine I'm pleased as punch at how it turned out The shade is U section cut from the square tube by filing away two edges and peeling out the resulting strip with pliers. I then filed down the web to the base of the U at both ends, one straight, and one diagonal, so I could fold them up to make a sort of trough. I didn't get the diagonal end matched up very well, but I filled both ends with solder and filed them down flat. I've had a go at adding some of the bevels from the prototype, although I think I need a vice to get the long slope of the sides since I can't hold it steady enough with fingers! The sharper slope at the back was easier and is worth doing since that seems to be quite a strong feature on the real thing: Once cleaned up, the lighthouse LED was a push fit into the channel (only in one direction though) so mounting the shade was pretty easy. Since the post is quite visible at the back of the shade, I fixed the LED so it was nearly flush with the top of the post. One leg is trimmed very short and has a length of fine wire (Howes decoder wire) soldered to it. I don't have any really fine heat-shrink, so I've tried to keep the insulation neat, and theres a strip of masking tape to ensure the end of the wire can't touch the shade. The insulated wire runs down the post in what I assume is the usual way, with the post itself being the other conductor. The LED isn't exactly discrete, but it's not too visible below the shade. It would likely be possible to do something better with a surface mount LED, but they look difficult to solder! I'm also thinking that some kind of diffuser (clear plastic tube/sprue sanded matt?) would make it look a bit cleaner. For the base of the pole, there's a shorter length of the larger tube with a taper filed into the top - it just slides over the inner. I haven't cut anything to length yet, but I suspect I'll trim the outer tube exactly to size, and leave the inner tube long for planting. Construction time was a bit over an hour, plus half an hour for a false start on the shade - I tried using small snips rather than filing to cut the webs and ended up with mangled awfulness! I also learned a useful lesson about LEDs - you need a limiting resistor even on if you're using 2 AA batteries So I burnt out my first LED and had to desolder it and mount a new one. Ah well It looks quite nice lit up though, and probably cost about a pound to make. Now I just have to make two more, which should be interesting since the shade dimensions for this one are eyeballed rather than planned properly - I wasn't expecting to get something I could use, to be honest. Proof it works

Timely question - I'm going to be in Amsterdam next week and am also looking for places to go. I'm pretty sure I've been to a shop off the Vondelpark which was interesting but seemed to be mainly German and Dutch HO. There used to be a range of trains in one of the Intertoys shops off the Kalverstraat - that may have gone now since it was looking quite thin last time I was in there. Thanks, that's a useful list and matches up with one or two places I've been to. Schaal Treinen Huis looks good from their website, and is a bit nearer to the centre than the far end of the Vondelpark - that was quite a hike. If you have more time when you're in the Netherlands, this shop in Heerhugowaard looks well worth visiting: http://www.huider.nl/. I can also recommend Kuijper's Hobbyhuis in Utrecht, which can be combined with a trip to the Spoorwegmuseum. Cheers, Will

I don't think the issue with the tree colours is one of toning down/reducing saturation - more that the trees on the left have a different hue (much bluer) than the backscene trees and stand out as a result. Rather than airbrushing them, maybe you could give them a going over with hairspray/spraymount and suitable scatter? With a typing paper screen it's possible to do this in-place on the layout - I've re-flocked my lone tree on Tanis a couple of times like this. A rattle can of Tamiya paint might be an easy option too - lots of good camo colours - but check it doesn't eat the foliage first I respectfully disagree with Rhys about the grass, I think that looks fine as-is, again because the hue is close to the backscene. You may also find that the backscene interface is less important as you get a few more foreground features and details in (some low shrubs in front of the station maybe?) to break up the flat board. Talking of colours, I really like the blue door on the station building - it draws the eye right in to where it should be!

I wondered about that too. I thought I might use some movie magic and do the initial greening off the layout with the wall at a 30-45' angle. I'll let you know if it works

Whitemoor is handy in that it's a fen prototype with a bridge as a view block. The new incarnation of the yard is even better in this respect since significant earthworks have been done to build a cycle path on the west side of the bridge which runs parallel to the yard throat. I tried to rough in the embankment with Styrofoam initially, but it wasn't a good fit - the real thing is very artificial in form (it's not just an earth bank) and I took it out and used straight-cut 10mm foam board instead. This works much better and makes it possible to have the sharp corners and discontinuous slopes of the real thing. I have a piece of 3mm board cut out for the path surface, which is just thin enough to form the short transition curves without kinking, and also the road surface. I've cut it a couple of mm wider than the bridge deck so it bows up in the middle as per Norwood Road, though this all needs bracing up still. With the framework in place I had a look at the retaining wall. I thought initially it was some kind of concrete product like Criblock but after going through the pictures again (several times) and finding some more construction pictures it's actually a lot more interesting than that. The wall in question is the one on the left here: http://fenlandfotos..../p25785286.html. It's actually got a fair bit bushier since then! It turns out (from shadows on Google Maps) that the cycle path is on its own embankment, rather than the ground sloping up here. Obvious really, but I didn't spot it at first. I assume it was built as part of the work to screen the yard from the surrounding housing when it was re-opened. This embankment is very steep, and following the sequence of Geoff Tibble's photo's here (http://fenlandfotos....855009_121.html) it appears to be some kind of wooden former, with gabion-like bags or boxes of earth/gravel/something wired to the sides to allow plants to grow. Perhaps because it's too steep for an earth bank? This picture by Alexander Shaw shows the detail quite well, especially in full size: http://rail-image.fo.../p14398225.html So how to build it? I started off by cutting some mount board to shape for the two sections, and then making a pile of miniature bricks from styrofoam offcuts. These were PVAd to the mount board, and they looked sort of decent but unsurprisingly rather higgledy piggledy. I wanted to capture some of this, since there's variation evident in the original, but perhaps not as much as I did I went ahead to the second part of my plan anyway, and used a heat gun to round off the bricks and turn them into bags. Not so good... As I probably should have expected, any glue which bled up between bricks didn't melt as quickly as the Styrofoam and left ridges and other naff bits. I thought about things a bit and decided that a no-glue approach would be better, and would save me having to cut out all those bricks (that I'd already cut out) to boot. I cut new wall sections from 5mm black foam card, and peeled/sliced away the top layer of paper a la Emmanuel Nouaillier. Rather than embossing the sacks, I carved their shapes about 1-2mm deep using a mixture of ruled lines and freehand to try and capture something halfway between order and anarchy. So far so good: Applying the heat gun again to round off the edges and corners, I was pretty happy so of course pressed on and forgot to take any step-by-step pictures, sorry! And here's where the sewing comes in: I painted the whole thing with a mix of raw umber and gesso, and then dug out a fine needle and some nylon monofilament for the wiring. A couple of tries on isolated corners suggested that representing all the wiring (two or three wires supporting each sack) would be crazy, and leave the sacks with ragged edges from the needle holes. I ended up compromising and stitching one wire across 2-4 sacks at a time, staggering the stitches so the needle holes weren't aligned. It should be possible to cover them up in earth and greenery later, or just not worry about them (For the sewing-inclined, it ended up as a sort of messy parallel backstitch.) And here's the result, which I'm quite pleased with - it's not exactly like the prototype, but it's a lot more like it than an earth bank (too steep) or a brick or block wall (not green enough). I'm looking forward to planting it but I should get the rest of the major earthworks out of the way first. And on the layout - which looks a bit odd, I think it might be slightly misaligned and mangled by perspective, since the courses do line up properly really! The best thing about all this was that since I was working on the living room floor, my daughter decided to join in and used various offcuts and masking tape to build me some "background mountains" (her words) to put on the layout She's not always convinced that Papa's modelling isn't a waste of time, so it's a treat when she joins in and it passed a rainy day quite well. Next step is to get her soldering up some brass engines for me

Jon, that sounds pretty good, I suspect a smear of PVA down the crack (oo er) and a sprinkle of ballast might do the trick. Jamie, thanks for the reminder about geograph - it's one site I look at occasionally and then completely forget about. I couldn't find any Whitemoor bridge pictures there either, but it is full of useful Fenland stuff which will matter when I come to do the drain along the front of the layout. It does make me maudlin though, I get more homesick for the fens than I do Sheffield for some reason. James, you're right of course. I'm just concerned about time, but I'm thinking maybe I can take some plastic and simple tools on holiday - I'm going to be away for three weeks of the remaining 60-odd days before the deadline One of the things about going away with small child in tow is that you tend to do a lot of sitting around in the evenings... Working on the retaining wall at the moment, which is requiring some odd stuff to replicate the construction. Will post more once I've found out if it'll work or not

There isn't going to be much in the way of elevation on this layout, and what there is is nearly all at the road bridge and embankment. This has been quite tricky to research, since everyone seems to stand *on* the bridge and take pictures of locos for some reason The roadway and path are nicely visible on Google street view, and there are a couple of small pictures of the bridge itself on Flickr, taken on the open day I think. Unfortunately the photographer doesn't have larger versions available, although he was able to dig up useful a wider view which shows the wing wall: http://www.flickr.com/photos/17889585@N03/1859050951/ http://www.flickr.co...N03/4705921484/ It looks like the abutments are some kind of dark engineering brick, but I can't really see. The central pillar has curved ends with coned tops which should be fun to build - at least I only have to do one I don't have room for anything like the scale bridge, at least not without reducing the embankment to nothing, so some selective compression is in order. I widened the openings in the profile board to try and get a better sense of the (quite spacious) openings, and built a framework from foamboard. Dimensions are eyeballed from the photos. The girder in the first picture is a bargain bucket stand-in. It's about the right length for my compressed bridge, but it doesn't have the features or geometry of the real thing, which has a flat base and bows up with the bridge deck. It's also completely different as regards the bracing. So I really want to scratchbuild one, but it depends if I have time or not. If I don't, I'll probably need to add some more depth at the very least. The good thing is that with the abutments more-or-less defined, I can build the embankment and trim the profile boards back. In other news, I fixed a minor rail kink and ballasted the double slip in place. There are quite a few spots in the ballast where you can see edges resulting from multiple ballasting sessions, I suspect sanding or light remedial ballasting will cure these.

Well, it's done After a coat of paint (dregs in a Tamiya Nato Brown rattle can) spring removal, and some trimming of the naff plastic bits, it was ready to go in. I was able to use full length metal joiners on both ends, full length plastic joiners on one, and half length plastic joiners on the other. One end I just eased the slip into, and the other slid them back out of the way and restored them with pliers and screwdriver, much as you suggest. My clip-fit insulated joiners didn't work out, but never mind. I was a bit annoyed once I'd got it all down to spot that I'd trapped one plastic joiner under the rail, but I was able to cut half of it off and remove it, and slide the other half across the join. All the joins feel dead level now, and I'm happy to report that 08871 has been through the slip in all directions under power, with no obvious problems and the points changed with the Tortoises! :D

That looks like a grand day out, thanks for posting the pictures as it's a view not many of us get to see!

Bolstered by a cup of coffee, I thought it was better to attack the single slip before I chickened out. Inspecting Man was less than impressed: I should point out the rationale for doing this - the single slip really doesn't make much sense for the layout as it is, and if I'm going to be operating it on my own for a two day show I think it's worth some pain and delay now to make the operation as simple and sensible as possible. With a double slip, I can bring trains in on the correct line, and then work them into the yard with a single movement as opposed to a shuffle. It'll also be possible to bring longer trains in and it'll avoid clogging up the depot and loop to boot. So... having bought the slip, does it fit? I know it's supposed to, but nothing beats checking. Plus this bit was easy Next step was to disconnect the feeds to the stock rails and frogs, and remove the point motors so there wouldn't be any stress on the operating arms. Then I removed the paint from the rail joiners, and was pleased to see I hadn't soldered the joints because all the rails are powered by wires anyway. I cut through the rail joiners with a Xuron cutter for the meta ones, and a knife for the rest. Naturally this was after a couple of abortive attempts to open them out with a screwdriver Cutting them makes a lot of sense - it's easy to pull the remaining half off the rails that remain in situ, and there's no force applied to the rails. With all that done I went from one end to the other gently levering at the sleeper base with a small screwdriver. ...and with a bit of fiddling the feed wires through the holes, out it came. The surrounding trackwork is almost unscathed, but I did lift the rail from a couple of chairs at the lower left - odds of getting it back in are low, but I can trim half the chair away on the side away from the viewer so the rail sits flat, and trust the double slip to set the gauge, possibly with the aid of a drop of superglue. Cleaned up, the damage doesn't look so bad. I need to make some modifications and solder feeds to the double slip, spray it brown, and install it. Just hope I'm not chasing poor running gremlins for the rest of my life - the trains ran through the single slip very nicely indeed

I think if you've got glue backing the tape it should be fine - I built a small board (and scenic supports on another) with foamboard bonded with PVA, and masking tape to hold it in place while it went off - no problems so far. It's worth doing a Chris Nevard and facing the sides with something harder - he uses ultra-fancy aero ply, I used 3mm MDF. Both protect against knocks and also provide some longitudinal stiffness. How're you joining the boards together? As to the layout, I saw some pictures of Laira for the first time recently, it looks like a great prototype. Look forward to seeing how it turns out! Will

Ahah - I was wrong, the next picture after magic_monkey09's shows 60014 had the silver door from 2006 to 2010: http://www.garyschofields-railwaypics.fotopic.net/p63228692.html I guess that means I ought to do it ISTR someone mentioned using a mixture of a metallic and nonmetallic light grey to approximate the Corus silver?

Thanks for the feedback and suggestions, all! I think I agree about the brown wash, the light parts are a bit too strong at the moment, and they do seem to weather to a very flat colour eventually. Doing the door would be interesting if I can get it out to paint it, but I'm not sure how long it lasted as silver. It's funny, I'd looked at that picture at Ely before but I didn't spot it wasn't black! On a like note I'm quite pleased no-one has pointed out that 60014 got some mismatched buffers, possibly in the same refit - also visible in that picture. I'm not going to do that immediately but might come back to it post-Railex.

Fabulous, thanks Rich! Probably harder to do dirty white than dirty metal though...

I made a start on the underframe today. The more I look at detail pictures, the more I marvel at Hornby's tooling - there's really nothing missing. The first step, as seen above, was to paint the entire underframe with Tamiya Nato Black, which is a useful not-quite black and has a very flat finish which should help the powders stick. It also means that because my finish is based on an out of the bottle colour, it's easy to paint out mistakes. Then I went looking for pictures - I found some shots of 60014 in 2006 looking generally tidy, with nice shiny beastie stickers and what appears to be a recently replaced or renewed piece of underframe equipment - one of the whatever-they-ares that look like generators is a much lighter grey than in later images. So my aim is something like this picture by Rob Reedman (for colour reference only since it seems to have been badly downsampled?) With the black out of the way, I spent a couple of hours this afternoon touching in details - please forgive me if I get the names wrong or don't even attempt them! The main bits were the cylindrical items by the outer wheel bearings and what look like lift/lashing hooks (but probably aren't) on the bogies. On the "generator", I added a warning sticker, and a dot of red for the plug, and in the tanks area some handwheels, and what look like green electrical cutout switches. I was hoping to refer to Brian Daniel's reference gallery, but most of the images won't load for me at the moment, hopefully they'll be back soon I've also lightly drybrushed the bogie frames and various corners with Vallejo Brown Leather, which is the same colour I used on my wagon underframes - I'm hoping this will provide some kind of visual continuity despite the 60 underframes looking more grey/black than brown. It all looks a bit stark and messy at the moment, but I think a gentle application of powders will bring things together. The big missing thing at the moment is that the bogie frames appear to collect quite a lot of matt brown stuff (brake dust?) on 60's, I'm thinking powders will represent this well. Here's the other side: One question in particular I could really do with some help with - what colour is the fine pipework on the bogies when it's new? It catches the light in pictures, particularly where the pipes curve up and disappear behind the top of the frames, but I can't pin down whether it should be shiny metal, or a flat light colour (white?).

Nice to see things happening on Paxton Road again! Those tidemarks look really good.

Looks great - and with the paint on the 25 barely dry too How do you form the tumblehomes? They look really consistent, but there doesn't seem to be much internal support from your overhead view.

Thanks for the kind words! Yes, I tore a corner off some typing paper and folded the ends under to get a sort of lumpy triangle. Then a bit of paint - GW Blazing Orange IIRC, which seems spot on for hi-vis jackets.

I was unhappy with what I'd managed last time, so I thought I'd have another go. The H&S poster is from a photo, printed on the computer - the paper is a bit thick, but the real thing appears to be a metal or plastic plate rather than a sticker, so some relief is OK. I should have used a low pass filter to remove the ambient light before resizing though! I've also painted the armrests and the knobs on the handles black as well as a couple of other details, and dusted some grot around the floor and bulkhead. I decided that the vest was a bit big so I repainted it into a vest and overcoat, sort of like this picture by Carl Davis. The driver is a second attempt as well, still not too happy but he looks a bit better than last time. This is by way of a practice since I'd ultimately prefer to have a 4mm scale figure in here rather than 1:87 - he looks tiny next to Inspecting Man I really should stop messing around with this and and get on with the layout - I'm not really following the Principle of Greatest Suck * here... * Work on the worst (suckiest) bit until it is no longer the worst bit. Then work on the new worst bit.

A bit late to the party here, but it looks grand to me, I can't honestly see what you'd improve on - I can't spot any voids, and the height looks spot on.

I thought I should take the plunge and get a test item of motive power finished up ready for Rail-ex in November. I like 60s, so it's going to be 60014, which I bought locally a year or so ago but hasn't been out of the box much in the meantime apart from the occasional ogling session First step was to fit a sound chip and speaker - this is using the Howes class 60 chip with a DCC supplies bass reflex speaker fitted above the twin grilles in place of the "doughnuts". Since my chassis is an 8-pin version, there wasn't initially room for the speaker at this end, and it doesn't really work at the other end either because the cutout for the cooler intrudes too far into the body. My solution, which may not be the best one, was to cut off the PCB mounting pins from the chassis casting and move the whole thing up a bit. I remounted the PCB on narrow strips of foam tape. It's still a tight fit, but it's possible to get everything in this way. I did cut a roughly 2mm bevel into the body shell on the edge of the cooler cutout, this doesn't go through to the outside but gives just enough space to clear the PCB at that end. I put the decoder underneath that area as well. At least there's plenty of room for the wires The speaker wires were cut short (why do they fit this hefty wire?) and soldered end-to-end with the decoder speaker wires, a bit clunky but it's wrapped in heatshrink and then tape to keep it all together. With the body off, I removed the jelly-like glue on the cab bulkheads and took them out so I could fit a driver. I also painted the small marker light lenses a warm yellow since they seem to be orangey-yellow rather than white on the real thing, and re-fitted the fire extinguisher which has been rattling around in one of the cabs for ages. The driver is from a cheap box of random Atlas figures, so he's a bit small. I'm almost embarrassed to show the close-up, since I haven't painted any 4mm figures before and this is painfully obvious. But better to be honest about these things I suppose... His shirt and tie colours are copied from a picture of 60014, and his jacket and trou are mixed up from a Vallejo dark blue and black. Unfortunately the blue was terribly glossy, so I gave him a coat of Humbrol Matt Cote which has helped a little. There's a little bit of "theatre makeup" shadow and highlight on the face to help it read better through the cab windows. I made two other small changes to the cabs - one was to touch in the door frame in silver paint, since you can see this glinting in pictures of 60014 when seen end on. The other was to add a hi-vis jacket hung up behind the second seat, again based on pictures. This is just a bit of paper painted orange, with the reflective stripes added with white paint and finished in silver. Through the cab window it all looks a lot more restrained, thankfully! Next job is to fit the bufferbeam details and install wire loops for the Sprat and Winkle couplings. The intent is to lightly weather the loco (gulp!) to represent its condition around 2005-2006, before the beastie stickers got torn.

"Wet Water" is a bit of US nomenclature, I think originally from Bob Hayden and Dave Frary: It means water with some washing up liquid, screen wash, etc. to make it flow better. I've also heard people talk about "Very Wet Water" which is the same but diluted further with Isopropyl Alcohol - that will wick into anything. I also tried ballasting with a spoon and I couldn't control it - my current favourite tool is a piece of card (header card from a ballast packet in my case!) folded in two, with about one teaspoon of ballast at a time. I really think this is the Rolls Royce of ballast applicators - you can vary the tilt to determine the rate of flow, and just tap gently to put the ballast right where you want it. I agree with James that a finger is a really useful tool for going along the inside of the rails and generally sorting things out. I tend to fill up the gaps between the sleepers one at a time since removing excess ballast is annoying (brushing it along the track into the bit you aren't ballasting generally works though) . Once you have a feel for the amount you need you can go a bit faster. After that's mostly done I do the outsides, which is a lot easier - just dump it along the sleeper ends and then flick it off into the cess with a brush One last thing - if you're using light ballast and your track isn't rock solid, tapping the rails with a brush handle is good for settling it and getting odd grains off sleepers.